“Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, if it does not throw out suffering from the soul.”
Epicurus,
fragment 54
“Work on philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, the epicureans and the stoics, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, perceived philosophy as therapeutic. Philosophy, on this view, is a way of (improving) life, it is, one might say, the medicine of the human condition. This course examines ancient Greek and Roman philosophical classics in line of the therapeutic tradition of philosophy. We shall engage with selected works of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, along with contemporary scholarly essays by Pierre Hadot, Anthony Kenny, Myles Burnyeat, Julia Annas, Martha Nussbaum, and Michel Foucault.
- Teachers: Anton Markoc